Dolby has found a way to use the full gamut of colors, local contrast and peak brightness

Dolby unveiled a new TV technology today with the goal of offering a picture that mimicked what the human eye sees, and that technology is called "Dolby Vision."

Dolby Vision is supposed to offer brightness, contrast and colors in a way that no other television has been able to accomplish before. Dolby said that it threw traditional TV and cinema color-grading standards out the window, since they're based on old technologies, and has found a way to use the full gamut of colors, local contrast and peak brightness.

Today, video is created using a reference peak brightness level, and the unit of measurement is called‎ a "nit." Old TV displays had an average peak brightness of 100 nits, and that’s still the same reference level used today (although TVs today tend to take that signal and expand it to match their own peak brightness typically between 400–500 nits). But making the picture too much brighter will cause it to fall apart.

What Dolby found is that this peak brightness of 100 nits was far too small. The human eye is capable of seeing a wide range of brightness, from 1.6 billion nits while the sun is up at noon to .0001 nits when there's nothing but starlight. The 100 nits just wasn't covering it, as this number tends to only allow bright colors or dark colors to pop out in detail, but never both.

Dolby fixed this by building a 1080p, liquid-cooled experimental display with a backlight made up of 18,000 RGB LEDs and a peak brightness of 4,000 nits. This is huge, since standard reference displays use around 4,500 RGB LEDs and as we know, only 100 nits.

[SOURCE: Dolby]

This change in rules made the company able to color grade footage with a much wider range and improved contrast.

"The creative community is thrilled to have an expanded color palette and the added contrast so that viewers can see details that might have previously gone unnoticed," said Roland Vlaicu, Senior Director, Broadcast Imaging, Dolby Laboratories. "Meanwhile, TV manufacturers can offer consumers a dramatically improved video experience, regardless of screen size or viewing distance."

Dolby Vision's technology covers the whole deal from the mastering process to the actual displays. The company said it has already signed on with hardware makers Sharp, TCL and Vizio for Dolby Vision-packed TVs.

In addition, content providers like Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Microsoft’s Xbox Video and Vudu have all agreed to offer Dolby Vision-specific content. TV shows and movies will have to be graded for the Dolby Vision format specifically, but Dolby is already taking care of that by offering reference displays and software plugins to companies.

Dolby Vision TVs are expected to be ready to hit the market by holiday season 2014 (which is also when major Hollywood studios should have films equipped for Dolby Vision). A few prototypes are hanging around at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2014 this week.

So I guess we just throw away the industry standard sRGB/rec.709 color gamut? Are industries going to start standardizing DCI-P3 or Adobe RGB for broadcast or film releases? Hell no, lets just pump out a 'technology' that turns up the brightness, saturation and vibrancy in post and call it a day.

I don't think this is meant for a consumer TV. I think it's meant as a reference standard. They're saying that current references are based on ancient display technologies which couldn't get very bright. They came up with a new reference which although needs ludicrous equipment today, should serve as a good reference for brightness and gamut well into the future.

This Dolby proposal is just silliness designed to support a flagging stock and company in disarray. Dolby doesn't build anything anymore, their only income is from licensing - in many cases licensing technology that can be replaced by open-source solutions. This "brightness" increase has come from a company called Brightstar. Dolby's track record at packaging and marketing outside technologies has been very poor - witness DVD-Audio, a technology developed by Meridian.

The elephant in the room? Dolby can't suspend the laws of physics. A 4000 nit brightness television will use over 30 times the electricity of a standard TV! Governments around the world have spent decades getting televisions, huge electricity users, into low power usage. In one step Dolby proposes a technology that will require construction of new power plants around the world?

With so many of Dolby's technologies built on "data reduction", they're being "Moore's Law'd" out of existence.

They're not saying put these 4000 nit power monsters in every home. They're putting these units into the hands of content creators, who use them as reference 4000 nit displays. As opposed to a reference 100 nit unit. In no way does this imply that you're going to be running displays in your home that are nearly an order of magnitude brighter any time soon.

I guess since they are getting pretty much stomped by DTS and pushed out of the Home Theater market due to most Blu-Ray releases defaulting to DTS-HD MA, they want to try to force a new proprietary standard for video. Honestly without support from Sony and Sony Pictures/Sony Professional, as well as Samsung and LG (aren't they they two biggest TV makers in the world?) I don't think it will get far. It sounds nice but I don't see how making an image brighter makes it more realistic.

I think you mean XYZ, as P3 is an old film emulation gamut and DCI has specified XYZ for all DCP mastering. I don't know why you mentioned Adobe, as they have nothing to do with the video space.

Where this makes sense is in file-based or streaming content. There's nothing to keep Netflix from offering up two different versions of the same flick. Just set a preference and flag the content so that the tv knows which space to use.

It's too bad that this didn't happen before, as most LCDs and, I'd gather, plasmas support Deep Color and xvycc. I really wanted to see that happen.

Personally, I think that 100 nits is plenty bright, given the large sizes of most people's tv's.

100 nits seem to be the peek positive value (range). In the article it states that many TVs have this set to around 400 nits. I think and I could be very wrong that if you had a picture (like they do) of someone with the sun behind then in the old system the dark area would be at 300nits and the sun behind would be at 400nits giving a range of 100 nits. What they seem to be doing is to have the person in the foreground at 300 nits and the sun at 4300nits.

The problem here is that it does nothing to expand the color gamut. We are still limited by the HDMI "deep color" standard of 0-255 definition. spreading out the peak only reduces the gradients leaving it blocky, and if you want to rewrite the range you need to revisit the signal standard. Good luck there.

Even still, without rgb backlighting you cant just create contrast that isn't there. Current tv standards just don't have the contrast range and is one reason why limiting to 100 nits actually betters the picture. If the RGB backlight isn't per pixel there will be a lot of messy bleed and akward image detail. Since that king of brightness would wash out the lcd we would be limited to the actual RGB pixel for our image... and then it's just an LED tv.

quote: HDMI 1.3 supports 10-bit, 12-bit and 16-bit (RGB or YCbCr) color depths, up from the 8-bit depths in previous versions of the HDMI specification.

quote: HDMI 1.3 adds support for “x.v.Color™” (which is the consumer name describing the IEC 61966-2-4 xvYCC color standard), which removes current color space limitations and enables the display of any color viewable by the human eye.